Japan must ban sexually abusive images of children in manga comics, despite claims that such a move would threaten freedom of expression, the UN’s special envoy on child protection has said. Maud de Boer-Buquicchio praised Japan for passing a law last year that banned the possession of abusive images of children, but said it contained loopholes that allowed exploitation to continue.

On coming to terms with a mother’s unspoken mental illness. By Fariha Roisin.

An autopsy ruled that Phoebe Jonchuck drowned. But that doesn’t explain why she died. By Lane DeGregory,

Government agencies have been trying to protect children for nearly two hundred years. Why have they failed? A political history of tragedy. By Jill Lepore.

During nearly 30 years as a state and federal lawmaker, Dennis Hastert presented himself as a champion of children, a hardworking, humble boy from the cornfields of Illinois who learned valuable moral lessons as he rose to become one of the most powerful men in federal government as U.S. House speaker.

A British paedophile who wrote a manual on how to abuse children and sold videos of himself raping children and babies online is facing as many as 22 life sentences after admitting an unprecedented number of child sex offences. Richard Huckle, 30 from Ashford in Kent, pleaded guilty to 71 offences including rape, sexual assault and grooming following an nine-year campaign of abuse against children in Malaysia.

Richard Huckle, a 30-year-old man from Kent, has been handed 22 life sentences at the Old Bailey after admitting abusing children in Malaysia. His youngest victim was just six months old, his oldest was 12. It is thought he may have abused up to 200 children over a decade. Angus Crawford reports.

Parents in New Mexico say they’re out of options with their teenage son. In an attempt to discipline their 16-year-old, they’ve started forcing him to live in tent as punishment. See the full video below.

Newly obtained reports from the 2003 child molestation investigation of Michael Jackson reveal that the late pop star had stockpiled gruesome underage pornography on his Neverland Ranch. During a police raid in November of 2003, his California home was reportedly found with pornography that included both adults and children, animal torture, S&M, and gore, along with "drugs to treat sex addiction, with multiple prescriptions written by a variety of physicians," according to documents obtained by Radar Online.

Between 2004 and 2013, around 4,500 children under the age of 18 got married in the state of Virginia. Of these girls, more than 200 of them were aged 15 or under. Last week, the authorities in the state introduced new legislation that updated rules that had until then made it legal for girls aged 12 or 13 to get married if they had parental consent and were pregnant. The changes - a move that campaigners said brought Virginia’s laws into the 21st Century - followed a long fight by activists who said the change was aimed at curbing forced marriage, human trafficking and statutory rape disguised as marriage.

A Kansas church is asking a court to punish two young girls who sued them over sexual abuse by a former Bible school volunteer by forcing them to reveal their identities. The volunteer, Kessler Lichtenegger, pleaded guilty last year to attempted rape and attempted electronic solicitation involving two girls under the age of 14, who attended the church.

The comedic actor who played gray-haired grandma Dona Concha on Univision's "Sabado Gigante" has been sentenced to 153 years in prison for possessing child pornography. Adonis Losada, 52, learned his fate on Wednesday, several months after a Miami-Dade jury convicted him on 51 counts of possession of child porn images on his computer. Losada still insists "there is plenty of evidence" that he didn't commit the crime, according to The Miami Herald.

Three children between 5 and 7 years old were left in the scorching Mojave Desert without shoes or water Wednesday as punishment by their parents, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said. The 7-year-old girl and her little brothers, ages 5 and 6, were found in Twentynine Palms on Wednesday. They were spotted by a passerby near the 74000 block of Samarkand Drive, a residential road at the edge of a patch of vacant, dirt- and brush-covered land that’s the size of three city blocks. Authorities said the children were found about 11:20 a.m. when the heat would have reached about 100 degrees...

The head of the United Nations Population Fund has, for the first time, described female genital mutilation as "child abuse". Dr Babatunde Osotimehin told the BBC that the custom was a human rights abuse and needed to end immediately. More than 200 million women and girls around the world have undergone the procedure, where parts of the female genitals are removed. The UN estimates a further three million are at risk of being mutilated.

An Afghan cleric has defended his marriage to a six-year-old girl, saying she was a “religious offering” to him. Mohammad Karim, who is believed to be in his sixties, was arrested after marrying the girl. He has told officials that he had been given the girl as a “religious offering” by her parents, Agence France-Presse reports. However, her parents reportedly claim she was abducted without their consent from the Herat province.

In the depths of India's illegal mica mines, where children as young as five work alongside adults, lurks a dark, hidden secret - the cover-up of child deaths with seven killed in the past two months, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation has revealed. Investigations over three months in the major mica producing states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh found child labor rife, with small hands ideal to pick and sort the valued mineral that puts the sparkle in cosmetics and car paint.

The devastating trauma and abuse inflicted on children held by Australia in offshore detention has been laid bare in the largest cache of leaked documents released from inside its immigration regime. More than 2,000 leaked incident reports from Australia’s detention camp for asylum seekers on the remote Pacific island of Nauru – totalling more than 8,000 pages – are published by the Guardian today.

The boy with the machete is watching us. We’re sitting in an SUV in the middle of a rugged, red-dirt road about 10 miles outside the city of Abengourou, in eastern Ivory Coast. It’s just after 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and the early morning haze hasn’t yet burned off, so a mist hangs over the fields around us. We’ve been slowly bumping along on our way to meet some farmers in a nearby village called Appoisso but stop for a moment to take in the scene. Suddenly the boy is standing right next to us. He looks curious, but wary too. We scramble out to greet him. In French my translator asks him his name.

Turkey's constitutional court has prompted anger after voting to scrap a law that automatically categorises sexual acts with children between the ages of 12 and 15 as sexual abuse. Judges in the country's highest court voted to annul the provision by a narrow margin, in response to an application from a district court which complained the law did not differentiate between age groups in cases of child sexual abuse. The complaint also said the law failed to take into account the “consent” of victims in cases where the child victim was between the ages of 12...

Former BBC DJ Chris Denning has pleaded guilty to 21 child sex offences committed between 1969 and 1986. The 75-year-old, from London, admitted the abuse of 11 boys as young as eight. He denied three other offences. Denning, who was arrested in a police inquiry into the Walton Hop Disco for teenagers in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, will be sentenced on 6 October. He was part of the original line-up that launched Radio 1 in 1967, but left two years later.